My DS106 Experience

I was searching through the assignment bank looking for ways to incorporate my character, Merrill Shale. When I found this one, I considered how I might make a video of an animal talking go along with an old Western gambler, and the answer came straight to me… If you aren’t with me yet, we are not on the same wavelength: dogs playing poker. Or in this case, dog losing poker and complaining about it. So… I went in search. I aimed to find a dog barking video that looked had a dog that looked like one in one of those paintings, and I found a St Bernard. I recorded some audio, muted the dog track, and put them together. Then, I put Kenny Rogers in the background because it fits.

So, for this assignment, I remixed one I had done before, and I added some twists. In the original, I just made a digital copy of myself. For this one, I was going to make a video of the same, but the tool I found that lets me make a video avatar of myself had a robot that gave me an idea. I used the robot and let him have my normal voice, and then I made my reply and I turned my voice into a robot voice, or at least I attempted. The tutorial I used, the guy was far more soft spoken than me, so my results were not as good. I recorded both videos, and stuck them together in Movie Maker. Then I opened the video in audacity to work on the audio track. I triplicated the track, then made my edits to the portion I wanted to sound like a robot. I changed the pitch and tempo of the various tracks and added echoes. Here is the result.

So, for this assignment, I made a montage of Benicio del Toro clips from various movies. I tried to include something from all my favorites, although somehow Way of the Gun was left out. Past that, I tried to isolate the a few intense moment from the scene; the whole thing is supposed to be between 30-60 seconds. It was actually harder to cut it that short than it would have been to leave it long. The last thing I tried to do was make the clips sort of flow together and create the sense of a really abstract story. Intro at the beginning, confusion ensues, the action reaches a crescendo, and then it all falls with him going down at the end.

For this assignment, I did more voice acting for Merrell Shale. The instructions were to make a public service announcement, so I just thought of someplace that Merrell’s voice might be useful and decided to make a video about gambling addiction. I added a slide with some stats, but I could not find enough useful stats to fill it out as well as I would have liked. At the end, I switch from the information slides to a few images I thought fit what was being said better. I recorded the voice with audacity, then added it to movie maker. I added the pictures and captions to the audio. Then, I found a song that fit the mood, and I made sure to add credits again to give credit to freeplay for the music.

For this assignment, I created a video using old fashioned playing cards to create some Morse code. I used a few different playing cards to distinguish consecutive dots and dashed, and I used transitions to split things apart so it could be deciphered. Highlight the section between here (The right side up cards are dots, the sideways cards are dashes, and the transitions indicate new letters) and here if you want to know how the cipher works. After I arranged the images, cut them to the times that I liked, I found some appropriate music. Then, I added some credits to include my twitter handle and attribution for the song that I used. If you don’t want the take the time to figure it out, highlight between here (the answer is Merrill, my characters first name) and here. Likewise, you can click the link in that invisible section of test my mousing over it for a hint that really spoils the answer. I wanted to keep it short, just one word, so that it doesn’t take long to decipher for anyone so inclined.

So, for this assignment, I made a video of a few really powerful and influential scenes. The one from Band of Brothers and Pay it Forward instantly came to mind when I saw this assignment, but I had to put a bit of thought into coming up with the third. Accordingly, as I viewed the scenes while making the assignment, the former 2 still, repeatedly, inspired quite a bit of feeling. The scene from Band of Brothers is really a great moment in film and in history, since the event actually took place. The scene in Pay it Forward, however, has a significance all its own. I delve into some of that in the video, but it really made a lasting impact or at least coincided temporally with a period of drastic change in my life. The last scene I included because of the single line that actually made me want to see what was really a sub-par movie in the first place. I waited the whole movie for that scene, and I can’t honestly say I was disappointed when it came. The line, “canceling the apocalypse,” gives me goosebumps when I think about it.
To create the video, I added the three clips together in movie maker and then extracted the full audio with audacity. I used audacity to lay my audio over the audio from the films, then I re imported both the audio and original video into movie maker.